As a token of our appreciation for all the support we’ve received from SimCity fans over the past week EA is offering a free EA PC digital download game to anyone who purchases and authenticates SimCity by March 25, 2013 at 11:59pm PDT.

The thing that annoys me is when you seem to get to some unknown threshold and your population just plummets. I assume it's when your city goes from being mainly desirable to lower income Sims, to being middle income.

Cacker wrote:what Ref is alluding to, is essentially the new SimCity AI is shit.

they're not offering a free game because they're nice. ie, sorry its shit, is there another game you wish you'd bought instead ?

there isnt any ai though

putting a bus stop next to a casino will take people away from the casino because they'll head towards the casino, see the empty bus stop slots, fill those up first (Because nearest gap is better than) and then end up somewhere else and try and find a slot near wherever they ended up

The AI itself doesnt really have any intelligecne behind it its just a very very basic want/need fulfiller

A simulation of literal idiots who forget where they work and live every day

Well I'm downloading dead space 3 for free which is nice. Quite a good game to pass the time but there are some really annoying bugs that spoil things. The AI is what it is and if you play the game with that in mind and not like previous games then it is rather good.

1. The online requirement is uncessary and has be shoehorned into the game in the past 12 months. This time last year Maxis themselves stated that there was no online requirement. In the past weeks Lucy Bradshaw has stated that online was "infused into simcity's DNA from its conception" (shudder) and that making it offline would require "significant work", before backpedalling and making vaguer comments when it was quickly shown this was bullshit. Various mods already allow offline play, and the code line where the artificial 20min sync time with servers has been located and modified/removed. A purported Maxis insider even spoke out against all the EA FUD.

There are no calculations being done on EA's servers as claimed, only extremely basic exchanges of resources between cities. The whole things is a complete and utter shit over anyone who ever enjoyed SimCity.

2. Offline play and editing outside of the ridiculously tiny regions has been done days after the game was released, demonstrating the ridiculous arbitrary limits. when posted on the EA forums this was banned as a hack, all the whilst claiming to 'support modidng'

3. The underlying glassbox sim is horribly broken and it has been demonstrated that it does not even come close to providing any sort of simulation. Even the code itself has variables such as "simPopFUD" for the sim population, and there are arbitrary money modifiers to make sure a player doesn't go bankrupt as the economy itself is too fucked to actually work properly by itself.

6. EA fucked up their launch massively, not buying enough hamster wheels to cope with their idiotic DRM scheme

7. EA publically stated they'd offer refunds to anyone affected, whilst privately refusing to provide them and threatening to ban the entire origin account of anyone stopping the charge on their credit card:http://i.imgur.com/Tw82ymU.jpg

Between a game that clearly is half baked, unfinished and plain doesn't work properly, has numerous stupid arbitrary limits on gameplay, has no single player offline modes and a moronic unnecessary DRM system that does nothing but hand EA control whilst pissing all over the game, quite frankly anyone conned into paid money for this drivel should know better by now from EA. Still, enjoy your MoH:Warfighter free copy, another amazing EA effort there!

larchy wrote:1. The online requirement is uncessary and has be shoehorned into the game in the past 12 months. This time last year Maxis themselves stated that there was no online requirement. In the past weeks Lucy Bradshaw has stated that online was "infused into simcity's DNA from its conception" (shudder) and that making it offline would require "significant work", before backpedalling and making vaguer comments when it was quickly shown this was bullshit. Various mods already allow offline play, and the code line where the artificial 20min sync time with servers has been located and modified/removed. A purported Maxis insider even spoke out against all the EA FUD.

There are no calculations being done on EA's servers as claimed, only extremely basic exchanges of resources between cities. The whole things is a complete and utter shit over anyone who ever enjoyed SimCity.

2. Offline play and editing outside of the ridiculously tiny regions has been done days after the game was released, demonstrating the ridiculous arbitrary limits. when posted on the EA forums this was banned as a hack, all the whilst claiming to 'support modidng'

3. The underlying glassbox sim is horribly broken and it has been demonstrated that it does not even come close to providing any sort of simulation. Even the code itself has variables such as "simPopFUD" for the sim population, and there are arbitrary money modifiers to make sure a player doesn't go bankrupt as the economy itself is too fucked to actually work properly by itself.

6. EA fucked up their launch massively, not buying enough hamster wheels to cope with their idiotic DRM scheme

7. EA publically stated they'd offer refunds to anyone affected, whilst privately refusing to provide them and threatening to ban the entire origin account of anyone stopping the charge on their credit card:http://i.imgur.com/Tw82ymU.jpg

Between a game that clearly is half baked, unfinished and plain doesn't work properly, has numerous stupid arbitrary limits on gameplay, has no single player offline modes and a moronic unnecessary DRM system that does nothing but hand EA control whilst pissing all over the game, quite frankly anyone conned into paid money for this drivel should know better by now from EA. Still, enjoy your MoH:Warfighter free copy, another amazing EA effort there!

"if you play the game with that in mind and not like previous games then it is rather good."

Hahaha, yeah. If you ignore the fact that it's quite a way off being finished, it's rather good. Between this and Alien Cololnial Marines, I'm increasingly happy to avoid preorders or buying on release day/week... at least for big budget / full price games.

It's easy to feel the need to defend a game that you've already ordered, but really, a 3.8GB "patch" immediately after release (A:CM in mind)?